The Jaguar Read Online Free PDF Page B

dollars in the last year. He has taken many pounds of my best products. He has cost me thirty men to be deported or prosecuted. He has allowed the murders of another nine of my men to go without any authentic investigation. Nine! He himself killed two more last night.”
    “You have taken the wrong man’s wife. Bradley is a sheriff’s deputy and you invaded our home.”
    “He has been paid large money for doing some things and not doing other things.”
    “His salary is not large.”
    “But he is also employed by the North Baja Cartel of Carlos Herredia. You maybe do not know this. Maybe you spend your time making music. As you should. But there are many secrets in a marriage, some small and some not small. Maybe you are not welcome to this type of information. Maybe he does not want you to know where your fortune comes from.”
    “I don’t believe you.”
    “What you believe does not change the measure of things. Your husband is more than a thorn in my paw. He must surrender L.A. to me. Surrender it absolutely. Business is the thing we all do. Statements are to be made and answered. This is my example. A man must attend to the small things so that the larger things will occur properly.”
    “Fly me home and you’ll get what you want from my husband. All of it. I promise.”
    Armenta beheld her and Erin looked back. His sad hound eyes appeared clear and calm, resigned to things she did not know, and apologetic for things she did not want to know. “I will fly you home when I get what I want from you.”

5
    L OS A NGELES SHERIFF ’ S DEPUTY C HARLIE H OOD watched Bradley’s Cayenne bounce up the dirt road toward his house. He’s early, thought Hood, not surprised. Bradley had sounded intensely worried on the phone, though vague. He had never asked Hood for help in anything until now.
    It was evening here in Buenavista but still 102 degrees, according to the thermometer in the shade of Hood’s patio. Buenavista straddled the border and was often the hottest place in the nation. Hood was attached to an ATF task force working the Iron River—the gun trade—between the United States and Mexico, and he had moved here from L.A. to be near the action. Hood liked action and the idea that he was needed and that what he did mattered. He was thirty-three, tall and lanky, with a forthright face and strong eyes.
    His rented home sat in the steep hills outside of town and from the eastern patio where he now stood he could see the little city huddled below, with its odd amalgamation of old and new: the ornate dome and cross of St. Cecilia’s, the zocalo, the narrow cobblestoned streets of the old town. And around them, like the growth rings in a tree trunk: the Rite Aid and the Blockbuster and the Ralph’s and fast food places on the U.S. side and the Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart and the stretch of maquiladoras and new apartments on the Mexican side. Hood could also see the new twenty-foot steel border wall. This hadrecently replaced the old chain-link fence, a porous formality along which Mexicans and Americans used to meet friends and family, trade news, exchange minor goods. Beyond the new wall were sharp mountains to the south and west.
    They sat inside with the air conditioner blasting. Bradley declined a beer. He had two butterfly bandages across gashes in his forehead. His eyes were rimmed in red and their hollows were dark and he had not shaved. He paced back and forth in front of the cavernous black fireplace, Hood watching him from an old sofa. Hood’s dog Daisy lay on the paver tiles at his feet, her snout on the cool tile, her dark brown eyes tracking their visitor. She was black and slender with a white blaze on her chest, and had the high-standing, flap-topped ears common to the border dogs from which she had come.
    Bradley told Hood the story of Erin’s kidnapping. Hood’s heart fell but he listened without interrupting. Erin had long been one of his favorite people and Hood had long believed that she would